Antivirus software came into existence in the year 1987 when it was claimed that first document of it was formulated by Brent Fix.

Even before the world of net could make its presence felt, viruses were spreading through the floppy disks, and though there were antivirus yet the same were not updated regularly. All the checking was being conducted through the executable files with the help of the boot sectors of the disks. But as the net began to get popularity, viruses got more space and more scope to multiply and enter into the systems.

Further virus writers also began to use macros to create new viruses to be entrenched within the documents and later email programs especially Microsoft Outlook Express also became a source for the spread of the same. That meant user’s computers could get easily infected by merely opening or viewing messages and virus checkers also had to keep track of more than one type of files. Also when broadband connection became a norm, more and more viruses began to get released, so it also became very important for the virus checkers to update the same regularly. Then also zero day viruses began to enter the system and starting spread very widely.

Later various kinds of powerful antivirus software were created which made a lot of difference yet in 2007 again their effectiveness decreased as they were unable to track zero day viruses. The problem erupted by the new methods being adopted by the virus authors to even break through the most powerful to powerful antivirus software. Earlier the antivirus used to run virus scanners on demand and some used to run real time scanning, while making use of the heuristic engines but now they make use of the solutions known as whitelisting, enabling it to track worst to worst viruses, prevent the same and even remove it.

Overall antivirus software is a crucial weapon for your systems so everyone must be equipped with the same.

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